PAM 2022 Best Paper Award: "Old but Gold: Prospecting TCP to Engineer and Live Monitor DNS Anycast"

Dr. Giovane C. M. Moura (Cybersecurity group and SIDN Labs) and colleagues from the University of Southern California/Information Science Institute (UCS/ISI) paper "Old but Gold: Prospecting TCP to Engineer and Live Monitor DNS Anycast" has won the Best Paper Award in the Passive and Active Measurement Conference 2022 (PAM2022).

While most DNS queries are sent over UDP, a small fraction of TCP queries are extremely valuable for operators. The authors have shown that there are enough TCP queries that can be "prospected" to deliver vital knowledge on their anycast networks' performance: their latencies to real clients. Rather overlooked, TCP latency can be extremely powerful: they have shown four cases in which they applied their technique to debug the performance of their anycast network, reducing latency to both Google and Microsoft in 90ms (see figure below). They have released four different tools and multiple datasets in the study. The paper is available from this link.